The present invention relates to a portable cart to be used to perform ophthalmic examination on patients who cannot be brought to an ophthalmic clinical facility and to enable medical personnel to perform major portions of an eye examination at a location remote from clinical eye care facilities.
Ophthalmic post-op patients are often confined to their beds or restricted in activity for periods of several days following surgery. The examination of these patients during the physician's hospital rounds is currently limited to tests and observations based on instruments the physician can conveniently carry or place in his pocket, generally a direct ophthalmoscope and a penlight. A small portable cart which stored a number of useful eye examination instruments and, if necessary, provided a power source for their operation could bring much of the capability of the ophthalmic clinic to the patient's bedside and would be useful in other applications such as in an emergency room when time is important or the patient cannot be moved to the ophthalmic clinic. Such a cart would be useful in small, 100 beds or less, hospitals as it would obviate the establishment of much more expensive clinical eye care facilities; and such a cart would be useful in larger hospitals for bedside care as well as emergency room use, it being estimated that currently there are some five thousand emergency rooms in the U.S.A.
While there have been proposed portable carts for a variety of purposes, such as disclosed in the following U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,868,154; 3,428,383; 2,209,294; 3,708,709; 3,715,148; 2,530,233; and 3,520,583; there are no portable eye examination system carts currently available although there has been a need for such carts for a long period of time particularly for the foregoing uses.